


KIT'N

by crownofplanets



Category: Original Work
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:41:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29010714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownofplanets/pseuds/crownofplanets
Summary: The circumstances under which local indie sensation KIT'N came to be would be regarded by its members as nothing short of a fever dream. It all started with a wedding, a penny-pinching groom and the hope of a bride for a live cover band. What will bassist Theo Finch have to do to put it all together before the end of summer? And what will it take for the rest of the potential band members to agree to perform at a stranger's wedding for free?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	KIT'N

Kalvin Kaufman lived inside a snow globe. The entirety of his world was encased in glass; explicit in its borders.

Inside the snow globe nested what Landing natives called ‘The Socket’: the rich neighbourhood, home of the seaside town’s finest and foulest. The vertical suburbs. 

Located just on the north edge of Landing, The Socket settled mostly on the wooded headlands that overlooked the rest of town. Monumental houses poked through the treetops like marble birds, scarcer the further up the hill one looked. To the West lay the open sea, gracing The Socket with a narrow shoreline down at the bottom of the valley, and a sharp cliff that sliced off the hillside where water meets land. 

Its limits were determined by a roundabout that always seemed to want to spit you back out the way you came. The snaking streets, smooth and perfect, likewise misled trespassers and puzzled them into submission. Somehow, intruders could never quite navigate its intricacies.

It was the magic of the snow globe. It kept strangers out, and natives in. 

Inside the snow globe, everything was eerily still. Frozen in time. A miniature valley with its miniature trees and miniature bird-houses. Thread-thin streets curled about the landscape like silver ribbons amongst the green. The roundabout pressed against the glass. Motionless waves were caught mid-spray across the rocky shore.

Pre-college exodus Kalvin Kaufman had been tricked by his own brain into thinking he was just another figurine, perpetually still in the perpetual stillness. In reality, Kalvin was the snow. Only stagnant as long as the snow globe was on the shelf. There was only the illusion of stillness, lasting so long as his world was not shaken.

And shaken it would be.

But for now, his world was dormant, and so, it appeared, was he.

There was routine to Kalvin’s days, comforting as it was maddening. He’d wake up in the quiet chill of his west-facing room, sprawling king-size bed solid and soft under him. He would walk through the cavernous hallways of his marble-and-oak home, down the alabaster staircase to the silent, empty kitchen and make himself some breakfast. By then, his parents would both be at work: his father in the boundless office all the way on the other side of the house; his mother in the town hall, right hand to the mayor of Landing. The only trace left of them in the pristine kitchen would often be the last bit of coffee still inside the french press. Kalvin would heat it up and pour it into a thermos. Then, he would weigh his options for the rest of the morning: there was studying to be done—and plenty of it—, and the grand piano in the library had just been tuned, so an early morning of Haydn was not completely out of the question. 

But he caught a glimpse of Toya’s pick-up in the gravel lot outside and he knew his options were reduced to one.

He took his crossword puzzles to the greenhouse.

The greenhouse had been his mother’s most expensive hobby when the current mayor’s career in politics was but a twinkle in his eye. She’d had it built and stuffed with expensive and rare flora, and had all the time in the world to learn how to care for them. But then, Mayor Richardson had dived head-first into his campaign, and Kalvin’s mother had _just_ the cocktail-dress silhouette to win elections, and so the greenhouse had fallen victim to neglect.

Kalvin liked plants well enough, he knew most of them by name—there were _Aphelandras_ , and _Aristolochia_ , and _Beloperones_ , and _Caesalpinia_. The problem was he didn’t like them enough to get his hands dirty, and so his parents had hired Toya. 

She was a middle-aged Spanish woman, old enough to be Kalvin’s mother but without the stick up the ass. She had a pixie cut, which made her cool, and a heavy accent, which made her even cooler. She was Kalvin’s best-kept secret. She taught him how to curse in Spanish and the names of the plants he didn’t already know, and in exchange, he taught her how to stay on his father’s good graces.

It was warm and humid inside the greenhouse, which Kalvin preferred over the warmth and dryness of the outside. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers and damp earth. It was such a stark contrast to the atmosphere he’d just left that his lungs panicked for a second, and drew one, two, three startled breaths. He could taste it, the _wetness_ of it, the sweetness of the scent. When the air settled in his lungs, it was like a soaked cloth had been wrapped around them. A heavy weight on his chest.

He waded through the damp toward the centre of the greenhouse, where a tiered fountain added to the overall splendour of the glorified terrarium. Toya leaned over the stone edge, scooping up duckweed with her bare hands and dropping it into a bucket.

“I thought you would be at the library,” she said, without looking up from her task.

Kalvin shrugged. He dragged his feet to one of the stone benches—the one least overtaken by the shrubbery—and sat down.

“How’s Steve?” Kalvin asked.

Toya snapped up at him, narrowed her eyes, “How’s the studying?”

Kalvin felt her piercing gaze more deeply than the bite of her words. He shrugged again.

“He is probably still picking up his clothes from the sidewalk,” she told him, once the blaze was gone from her eyes.

“You kicked him out?”

“What?” She said, coyness mixed with shamelessness in the bounce of her shoulders, “It’s _my_ apartment, right?”

Kalvin smiled. 

“ _Pinche gringo_ ,” she muttered under her breath, forcefully dumping the last batch of duckweed into her bucket.

Even had she not taught Kalvin what the words meant, he would have guessed them anyway. It was something to do with the venom in her voice, he reckoned, or the white knuckles around the bucket handle.

“You want some?” Kalvin uncapped his thermos and offered it to Toya.

She melted in an instant.

Swiping the sweat from her brow, she came to sit next to Kalvin. “So,” she said, in earnest this time, “How’s the studying?”

“I like the studying,” he said it like _stoodi-ing_ ; a poor imitation of her accent.

She took one of the locks that had slipped out of Kalvin’s battered hair bun and pulled on it, toeing the line between violent and playful. 

“ _Pendejo_ ,” she said with a smile.

Kalvin opened his crossword puzzle magazine to a half-finished grid and pulled out the pencil that held his hair up. It fell in soft waves around his shoulders.

“Okay, thirty across,” she said, taking the magazine from him, “Lady’s man. Four letters. Last one is a D.”

“Stud,” he said, almost immediately.

Toya smiled slyly, “Lord.”

* * *

Ian Hayes loved a particular wall in his room; the one his bed was pushed against. In the beginning, it had been white. Years of friendship with the Kidd twins, however, had rendered it a smudged grey color, courtesy of endless dull afternoons spent laying on the bed with their nasty feet up against the drywall. Ian had called it art once, to keep his mother from painting it over. Ancient cave paintings had inspired them, he said. _Look, there! A prehistoric Doc Martens imprint!_ His mother had laughed and allowed it. She was good like that.

Ian could still make out the attempt at a smiley face him and the twins had made years before. Near the ceiling, just over a piece of forgotten tape where a poster had once been, were the round markings of a filthy rubber ball bounced against the wall with explicit purpose. Two dark circles over a snowman pebbled smile. A little further to the right lay the remnants of their ball-print signatures; three incomplete names: an _I_ next to an _A_ for Ian; an _M_ beside a _C_ meant to be an _O_ for Mo Kidd; and half an _S_ for Stuart Kidd, who gave up once he realised his name was much longer than the other two.

The wall was filthy and ugly, but it was an indispensable part of the room. A chronicle of Ian’s time spent within it. His childhood and teen years, all encapsulated in the drywall.

The sense that he would one day have to leave all of it behind always came back sharper in the summer months.

“I feel like we should be doing something,” said Stuart, who always felt like he should be doing something.

“We _are_ ,” his sister retorted, bare feet up on the wall. “We’re helping Ian get over his broken heart.”

Ian rolled his eyes and bounced the ball off the ceiling. A faint brown impression now spoiled the starkly white stucco.

“I’m not broken-hearted,” he told her.

She turned her head and squinted at him skeptically, “Sure you’re not.”

“What I _meant_.” Stuart propped himself up on his elbows, annoyed he’d been ignored, “is that this is my last summer here. Shouldn’t it be at least a little memorable?”

He was leaving for Boston in the fall. Ian and Mo were staying in Landing.

“Oh, boo-hoo, poor Stewy won’t have fun his last summer in—”

“Oh, fuck off, won’t you—?”

“Fuck _you_ , Stuart—!”

Ian tuned them out. It was all but second nature by now. Once the twins started arguing, there was little that could tear them from each other’s throats.

He glanced at Mo beside him, and at Stuart laying perpendicular to them, and basked in the familiar rhythm of their arguing. He realised bitterly that Stuart was right—he often was, despite Ian and Mo teaming up to challenge him: this summer needed to be memorable. Not only for Stuart, who would have to live off the memories of it to last him through his freshman year of college, but for the two remaining as well. His sister, though she would have loved to deny it, relied on Stuart as much as he did on her. And Ian… well, Ian couldn’t do without them. 

The three of them had a rough year ahead of them.

Through the noise of the twins’ argument, Ian’s trained ear caught the sound of the doorbell ringing.

“Shit,” he said, throwing his long legs off the side of the bed and striding out of his room. The door hardly muffled the sound of the twins’ bickering.

He took the steps down to the hall two at a time. The bell rang again. Through the frosted glass on the front door, he could already recognise the two hazy figures outside.

_Shitstain, goddamn, ass-fucker._

“Hi, Mrs Sheppard,” Ian greeted with a blinding grin. 

Beside the gangly woman stood a knobbly old man, all lumpy knees and elbows. Grandpa Hayes. Mrs Sheppard’s iron grip held him in place by the arm.

“I found him wandering around near my house. I thought you’d want him back.” Her smile did little to quell the irritation in her words. Grandpa Hayes had a habit of sneaking around.

Ian opened the door all the way and allowed the old man into the house.

“Thank you so much, Mrs Sheppard. I’ll be sure to send some of Mom’s cookies your way. For your trouble.” The sweetness in his voice was unparalleled. 

Before she could say another word, Ian shut the door in her face.

Grandpa Hayes had gone into the kitchen and was cleaning his pipe over the sink. Ian folded his arms and leaned one shoulder on the doorframe.

“Stop staring like that, kid,” the man said without turning around, “You said I could only smoke outside.” 

Ian clicked his tongue and pushed off the frame. “Not what I meant.”

The old man grumbled a response that Ian was glad he didn’t catch.

Before going back up to the twins, Ian stopped by his mother’s room. The door was closed, which usually meant she didn’t want to be disturbed. He went in regardless.

Marina’s was the darkest room in the house, and the coldest, too. She liked it that way. She liked to pull the covers over her body and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist.

Ian stepped over the piles of dirty laundry and abandoned magazines and reached her bedside. Her eyes were closed, tangled hair stuck to her sweat-slick neck. He could make out the hollowness of her cheeks even in the dark.

It hurt. There was no point in denying it. It fucking hurt. Seeing her like this, knowing there was little he could do about it. It killed him inside.

With great care, Ian placed his index finger just under his mother’s nostrils. The faintest sliver of a breath brushed against his skin. His shoulders sagged with relief.

“I’m alive, kiddo,” Marina whispered without opening her eyes.

A smile broke through Ian’s grim expression, so bright it could just about light up the dark room.

He leaned over her and kissed her temple.

“Just checking,” he said, and left her be.

* * *

Theo Finch thought their soon-to-be stepfather had shown his true colors as early as their first joint dinner. Their mother, though, blinded by the white teeth and the waxed chest, had still to arrive at the same conclusion. 

Lilly Park was a bubbly woman without a whole lot of capital to be of particular prey to a white man with a buttchin; but she made up for it in warmth and an impressive catalogue of Korean recipes. Theo doubted the bastard even enjoyed her _bibimbap_. 

They had always been skeptical about the man’s intentions with her, about the earnestness of his devotion for her. They never thought he’d go as far as to _propose_.

And yet Theo found themselves here: elbow-deep in cake batter, listening to their step-father yell over the phone about how _it is unreasonable to be charged a deposit just to save a date on a goddamn venue_. 

Theo threw a look at their mother, who was flittering over a printed-out recipe for a coconut and lime cake instead of paying attention to her would-be husband. Very determinedly flittering.

“I think we’ll need more lime,” she said sweetly, just loud enough to be heard over the last of her fiancé’s complaints.

The man hung up the phone and looked just about ready to throw it at the wall.

“The boat club is out,” he informed Lilly without further explanation.

She rose her eyes from the recipe and smiled as though she hadn’t overheard his half of the conversation, “Oh,” she said, hiding her disappointment masterfully, “That’s alright, honey. We’ll find something else.”

She leaned over the counter to grab at another lime, very pointedly ignoring Theo’s glare.

“Keep whisking that, sweetheart,” she told them.

Theo had figured out a while ago that Lilly used specific terms of endearment depending on the person she was talking to. And they had also figured out why. The man hated it when she called anyone else “honey,” because that was what she called _him_. He’d appropriated it, robbed everyone else of it. He held it with as much sure-footedness as his own name. 

He especially hated it when Lilly used _his_ name on her own kid. And so now she called Theo “sweetheart”, or “sugar”, or “darling”. Anything but “honey”.

Her fiancé came up behind Lilly and placed a forceful kiss on the crown of her head.

“By the way,” he said, only vaguely aiming his words at Theo, “your mother and I’ve been talking about music for the wedding. Garret already said he’d DJ, but your mother insists she wants a live band, so I suggested,” he paused for effect, though Theo already knew what was coming, “That you could play some guitar.”

It was nightmare fuel. A downright fucking horror show.

“But I play bass,” they argued.

Lilly opened her mouth, but Honey’s words came instead.

“Well, whatever it is. Think of how happy you’ll make your mother if you played at her wedding. Isn’t that right, dear?” He wrapped his arms around Lilly’s body and squeezed.

Two pairs of brown eyes stared into one another, both pleading. _Mom, I don’t want to do this_ , and _Please, just humor him this once_.

“It can’t be a band if there’s only the bass,” they said, trying to appeal to logic if Honey’s compassion was currently unavailable.

“Well, don’t you have any musician friends who can help you out?”

It was a low blow and he knew it. Theo didn’t have friends, they had acquaintances; people they were friendly with. None that would agree to play at their mother’s wedding, though. And for free, at that.

“Well, you’ll figure it out, won’t you?” Honey had a tendency of framing his questions like the only answer possible was the one he wanted to hear.

He didn’t stick around for Theo’s reply.

Lilly resumed all lime-related tasks while Theo stood there, stunned. What had just happened? Anyone looking in from the outside would have blinked and missed the moment Mr Honey had effectively manipulated himself a cover band for his wedding.

“Mom, do I really have to?” They asked once they’d recovered from the audacity of the man.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” Lilly dismissed the underlying protest in Theo’s question. “I can already picture you up there on a stage, all dressed up and beau—handsome,” Theo smiled at the adjustment, “I’ll tell everyone: “that’s my kid up there!””

Theo let themselves imagine it for a single second—bass hanging low off one velvet-clad shoulder, calloused fingertips hard at work—and quickly dragged themselves away from the fantasy. This is not what they wanted.

“Mom—I really don’t know anyone else who’d play.”

“Doesn’t school have a music program?” She asked, grating a lime like she wished she could the conversation.

“Yeah, but none of them will play, like, for free.” Theo, too, whisked with purpose.

Lilly sighed, aware the conversation had reached the culmination it had been heading toward all along.

The truth was, money had never been an issue until Lilly started dating Mr Honey. If it had been tight, Theo had never been made aware of it, much less been made to suffer because of it. But Mr Honey was a penny-pinching asshole. Even owning a large portion of the land around their small town, and being landlord to some of the most profitable buildings within it, the man still refused to spend a single cent. He was, by all accounts, the very picture of rich filth. A regular Daniel Dancer.

It was Mr Honey’s enforcing his miser tendencies on Lilly’s family that made Theo hate him. Not for themselves, but for their mother.

And now they would have to dignify their charade of a wedding with assorted love songs.

“Look, sweetheart,” Lilly said, “There’s still time for you to put something together, yeah? It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just… I’d really like for my only kid to take some part in the ceremony. Garret is already best man, and Tiffany is my flower girl, so I’d like you to have _your_ moment to shine.”

Theo couldn’t say the sentiment wasn’t appreciated. But their contentment was overshadowed by the fact that this was all their mother could offer because Mr Honey had barred Theo from the role of bridesmaid. _Well now, Theo’s hardly a_ maid_, right?_, he’d told Lilly when the subject had come up. 

Question shaped like assertion. No other answer than the one he wanted to hear.

And because Theo was Theo, and they loved their mother more than anything in the world, they said, “Alright. I’ll figure something out.”

* * *

Nico Chavez had about a thousand secrets, all strewn about his life. The little ones were easy to hide: a packet of cigarettes shoved between the mattress and the wall; his Star Wars fics stashed under an inconspicuous AO3 username; the fact that he liked getting his hair brushed tucked somewhere between his stomach and his lungs. He’d become an expert at finding the nooks with the exact shapes of the secrets he’d fit into them. An authority on poker-faces; a master in the art of treasure-burying.

And then there were the big secrets. Like how sometimes he missed his Abue so bad that it physically hurt, and how there was no place for all the hurt to go but his fists. And the fact that he was very good at knowing when to stop drinking, yet he never put the skill to use. And how most of the time, the lips he liked kissing didn’t necessarily have to be attached to a girl.

There was no nook or cranny wide enough for the big secrets, so they burrowed into his chest and festered until they smelled.

Usually, Nico could put up with the stench. It was part of the deal: you can only keep a secret for as long as you can stand it. But problems arose when particularly sharp-nosed individuals caught a whiff of the scent. 

One of Nico’s secrets roamed around on its own two legs, and had a particular fondness for remarking on its own nature.

“I’m tired of being your little secret,” the secret said with its back against a wall, non-girl lips curling bitterly around the words.

Nico looked into its eyes and saw only half-conviction.

The thing about Nico Chavez was that he made every secret feel like treasure. A curly-haired, brown-skinned King Midas he was, minus the whole turning-his-daughter-into-gold thing. Blessed and cursed in the same breath. The slightest touch from his guitar-tamed fingers electrified the skin beneath them; the quickest of his glances placed a spell on whoever dared look back.

That was how poor Albert Acker had fallen: a look, a touch. He’d forgive Nico any secrecy as long as he kept looking at him like _that_.

And Nico was unabashedly aware of it.

So instead of dignifying Bertie’s pouty reproach with an answer, or explaining yet again that his family would hang him if they knew, Nico tilted the boy’s head back with a calloused thumb and kissed his neck softly.

“Oh, fuck you, Chavez,” Bertie said, fingers digging into the tangle of Nico’s curls.

Nico laughed against his throat, and a wave of satisfaction rolled through him at the sound Bertie made. He took pride in a job well done, and the noises coming from deep down the boy’s throat were nothing if not an indication of just how well Nico was doing.

There was a particularly lewd piece of graffiti on the wall next to Bertie’s ear that Nico’s eyes kept snagging on, and the air stank distinctly of deep-fried food. There was gum on the sole of Nico’s shoe, and the outdoor unit of the grocery store’s air-con hummed softly as it dripped condensation onto the ground.

It was ridiculous, of course. Most things in Nico’s life were. But this situation, by his own admission, was going a little overboard. 

Acker played football. A cornerback. And Nico had sworn off wide-shouldered football players the _moment_ his dad had pulled a Chivas jersey over his curls; the _instant_ he’d scored his first _gol_ through the balled-up sweatshirt and soda can that marked the posts. Boys like Bertie were the impostors; they had tarnished the word _football_ and instead given the real sport a replacement name. Nico couldn’t say “soccer” without gagging through every single letter.

Boys like Bertie were the enemy. But goddamn it if it wasn’t fucking hot.

This—what they were doing, what they _had_ been doing for weeks now—it was better because it was Acker. Because he was forbidden: by Nico’s own fucking brain, his stupid fucking ban on football players; and by his family because he was a guy. The second was admittedly sweeter than the first.

Fran would have had objections. She would have said that leading someone on out of spite was a bad thing, and that he better get his act together before he ends up alone forever. Nico could hear her disapproval so distinctly that he hadn’t even bothered to call her and tell her about him.

The part of him that was scared to tell his sister was also a secret. It didn’t feel as big as the big ones, or as small as the small ones. It landed somewhere in the middle. He was scared because he knew Fran would bring love into the equation, and Nico wanted love out of as many equations as he could keep it. 

“But seriously,” Bertie started again, rendering Nico’s efforts to bypass conversation pointless, “Can’t I at least tell Cora?”

“Dude.” Nico gave up the exceptional hickey he was working on and looked him square in the eye, “No. I told you already— _no one_ can know.”

Bertie looked back at him. They had known each other long enough for him to hear beyond the surface meaning of the words; to get a glimpse at the secrets underneath. Bertie’s steady breath—the _pity_ in his eyes—was Nico’s first indication that ‘long enough’ really only meant ‘enough’. 

The boy placed a hand to Nico’s cheek, as though the gesture could somehow soften his next words.

He spoke sweetly, so unlike the football player he was that Nico could almost picture him being someone else, “What are you so afraid of?”


End file.
